Introspectives #28

In all honesty I’ve been feeling somewhat down and hence my camera and I have not been out together for a while. But with Becky’s rooftops prompts this month, it was inevitable that things would start to look up and brighter too, especially now it is officially summer.

And there’s the rub – rooves (I still say this as opposed to roofs) mean skies which often mean too bright =blown highlights.

“blown highlights occur when the amount of light in the scene is too much for the sensor to cope with. When you try to recover that white area with Lightroom/Photoshop it just ends up looking like a uniform grey patch with no definition [though less so with Raw file than JPGs]”

“Learn to Use the Histogram: it is one of the most powerful tools your camera has to shows the distribution of light exposure, dark/left; light/right…Anything falling on the right side of the graph potentially becomes a blown highlight”.

“If your graphs spills out of the right side, then increase your shutter speed or close down your aperture until that graphs comes back inside”.

Looking across to rooftops instead of up made this shot more cohesive. The weather helped by throwing is some dark clouds but the blue cast puzzled me. I sometimes accidentally change the white balance setting to tungsten but this was one was definitely set on auto -[one of the tips though for better skies in Landscape is to heighten or lower the Kelcius settings of the white balance]
Anyway I did manage to capture a couple of reasonable rooftop shots for Becky’s June square challenge (black and white is easier)Although at times, photography can seem like a bridge too far, it keeps me on my toes and there are always those patches of blue sky when we come away with one shot we are pleased with…
….and this is the one that did not get away.
With thanks to Becky for her June Rooftop prompt (only 1 week left) and Sue Judd who pointed me in the direction of histograms a while back. All quotes are from Jason Rowe How to avoid blown hightlights

Introspectives: Thinking out loud with an aim to improve and learn more about photography. Hence the images are not always for show – feedback is welcome.

‘use the histogram’ is what I hear at every workshop, too, but I have to admit I despise looking at the histogram, for reasons unknown. It’s advice I know I won’t heed, no matter how often professionals tell me to.
I think you’ve done really well here with your skies. I’ve encountered the ‘uniform grey patch’ quite a lot this past week and have gotten frustrated with the editing program…